Movie reviews: The Paperboy

Brace yourself for the boxing analogies.

Welcome to the Punch (15A) combines the heft of a heavyweight with the pace and slick combinations of flyweight as it follows London police detective Max Lewinsky (James McEvoy) in his bid to bring down notorious gangster Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong).

The pair, it’s fair to say, have previous: the movie opens with an extended prologue in which Lewinsky tries to single-handedly foil Sternwood’s bank robbery, only to get shot in the knee for his troubles.

We then fast-forward a few years, where we find Lewinsky an embittered man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — but the shooting of Sternwood’s teenage son lures the criminal out of his self-imposed exile and back to London’s mean streets, offering Lewinsky a chance of personal revenge and professional redemption.

It’s a conventional set-up, but writer-director Eran Creevy’s second feature film offers plenty of variations on the crime flick’s traditional story arc. In fact, this is a British crime flick that raises the bar in a number of departments.

The post-industrial settings, gleaming surfaces and blue-shot lighting suggest that Creevy has watched more than one Michael Mann movie, and the story itself, while entertaining as a hi-octane cops-and-robbers thriller, also goes beyond the traditionally adversarial nature of the cop-v-criminal narrative to ask implicit questions about the symbiotic relationship of law and disorder. A fine supporting cast includes Andrea Riseborough, David Morrissey and Peter Mullan, but it’s the chemistry between Strong and McEvoy that makes Welcome to the Punch a knock-out.

Set in rural Florida in 1969, The Paperboy (16s) is based on a novel by Pete Dexter, a screenwriter with offbeat films such as Paris Trout (1991) and Mulholland Falls (1996) to his credit.

Thus the story of how Miami journalist Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey in excellent form) returns to his sleepy hometown in Moat County to write about the mistrial of convicted murderer Hillary van Wetter (a particularly sleazy John Cusack) was never going to be a straightforward affair. Indeed, Dexter and director Lee Daniels employ this familiar storytelling trope as little more than a jumping-off point for a labyrinthine tale of misogyny, corruption, violence, racism and suppressed sexuality.

As it happens, the usual narrative arc in such a story — the truth is uncovered, justice is served — is much less important than Lee Daniel’s interest in exposing his characters’ sordid secrets, and particularly those of Ward and van Wetter. Meanwhile, Ward’s younger brother Jack (Zac Efron) pursues an unhealthy obsession with trailer-trash blonde Charlotte (Nicole Kidman), who writes pornographic letters to convicted killers and pledges her future to the despicable van Wetter.

It’s entirely appropriate that most of the story plays out on the fringes of the fetid mangrove swamps, as this is a tale of an amoral group who are sinking into the morass with no ambition to rescue themselves or anyone else. Hardboiled noir at its hard-hitting best, The Paperboy is an unsettling but hugely satisfying film.

By contrast, Earthbound (12A) is a charming tale of innocence rewarded, as we follow Dubliner Joe Norman (Rafe Spall) in his bid to persuade his new girlfriend, Maria (Jenn Murray), that he is not just a comic-book geek with a fascination for sci-fi and interplanetary travel, but a bona fide alien who needs to mate with a human in order to create a hero who will lead a rebellion against tyrannical forces on his home planet.

Written and directed by Alan Brennan, the movie is an endearingly tongue-in-cheek tribute to the sci-fi genre which makes a virtue of this cheap’n’cheerful production values. Is Joe’s space-travel hardware bolted together from everyday objects and toyshop ray-guns because he’s a deluded fantasist, or because he is stranded on Earth and must make the best of our infantile technology? Spall and Murray make for a very likeable couple, playing the farcical situations with the proverbial straight face and generating bucket-loads of sympathy in the process. If it’s a feel-good romance that’s heavily influenced by Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy you’re in the mood for, Earthbound certainly won’t disappoint.